This Week, 3/27

Last Wednesday evening, as former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu was telling a sold-out book festival crowd that the backlash against removing Confederate monuments was “not about the statutes,” and that white supremacists were “having a field day” under President Trump, Charlottesville police were investigating a threat posted on 4chan, by someone using the Pepe the Frog avatar favored by white supremacists.

The anonymous poster, later revealed to be a 17-year-old in Albemarle County, claimed he was going to commit an “ethnic cleansing” at Charlottesville High School and kill “n—s” and “wetbacks.” The threat closed all city schools for two days.

While Landrieu, who appeared with City Councilor Wes Bellamy, had not yet heard about the incident, he compared racism in America to a cancer, and said we need to confront it rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. Both he and Bellamy talked candidly about the violent threats they and their families had received for suggesting that Confederate monuments come down.

It was at another Virginia Festival of the Book event, back in 2012, when then councilor Kristin Szakos first publicly broached the question of taking down or recontextualizing Charlottesville’s prominent Confederate monuments. In response, she received “a firestorm of vitriol and hate.”

That kind of ugliness reveals what the statues really stand for—entrenched, institutional racism, Bellamy and Landrieu said on Wednesday. And while plenty of people would prefer not to think about it, acknowledging that legacy of racism is essential to confronting our current problems, they said.

On Monday, the Black Student Union at CHS seized the moment to stage a walkout and draw attention back to longstanding racial inequities in the school system. We live in a city with deep inequalities that stem directly from an ugly racial history, and where lots of good people are working hard to address those issues. Let’s talk about it.

It’s a few weeks to primary day (June 11), and here in heavily-Democratic Charlottesville, the question of who will represent us next year will largely be determined now, not in November. Among the Democrats, the choices in both the state delegate and City Council races offer strikingly similar

By Jake Mooney Seventeen years ago, when I was a reporter for The Daily Progress and Lloyd Snook was the chairman of Charlottesville’s Democratic Party, he accused me of writing an instruction manual for voters to elect Republican Rob Schilling. I was not perfect as a reporter, but I thought

It’s almost that time of year again, when you can magically find a parking space on the Corner and there’s no line for grain bowls at Roots. So before all the students disappear (graduation is May 18 and 19), we pulled together some reporters from The Cavalier Daily to catch us up on life on

By Zyahna Bryant Attending UVA in the fall is an opportunity for me to redefine what “home” looks and feels like. I initially did research about UVA when I was in 5th grade, and I knew then that that was where I wanted to go. It was not until 10th grade that I even considered […]

On May 3, I joined a small crowd at City Hall to see 11 Charlottesville police officers receive their promotions. But only 10 were there. Officer Logan Woodzell, whose promotion to sergeant had been announced in the city’s press release the previous day, was not present and was not mentioned. A

News that no one wants you to know about notoriously drops on Friday afternoons, when reporters and readers are already looking ahead to the weekend. Coincidentally or not, it was Friday afternoon when the City of Charlottesville sent its bizarre press release about the Civilian Review Board,

Last Thursday, county schools Superintendent Matt Haas read a letter of apology to the community from the Albemarle teen who made a racist threat against CHS students. Joao Pedro Souza Ribeiro (we know his name because Charlottesville police released it, even though he’s a minor) made his

After nearly nine months of work, the Police Civilian Review Board is finalizing its initial bylaws. The proposed model would require the city to hire up to two full-time professional staff members to assist the board in processing and independently investigating complaints against

Councilor Kathy Galvin won’t be sitting on the dais in City Hall much longer. Instead of running for re-election to council this year, she’s currently campaigning as a progressive candidate for the House of Delegates. The planks of her platform are “a sustainable future,” “an equitable future,”

I’m not much of a basketball fan—okay, I’m not a basketball fan at all—but I love a comeback story, and the UVA men’s team’s journey from last year’s humiliating defeat to this year’s championship is as good as it gets. You’d have to be made of stone to be unmoved by the nail-biting excitement

It’s a very Charlottesville story: Megan Read first saw Michael Fitts’ work hanging in the Mudhouse when she was 16, and just learning to paint. “Holy shit—that’s what I want to do!” she recalls thinking. Years later, her own work was displayed there, and Fitts saw her piece

It’s budget season. For four months every year, council and staff hold public meetings about the coming year’s priorities. For four months, I sit through what I am absolutely certain is the exact same PowerPoint at least a dozen times. Much of it remains inscrutable to me. I am growing

Last week, we wrote about Detroit-based letterpress artist Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. If you’ve been to the Mudhouse lately, or a dozen other spots around town, you’ve seen his work: the brightly colored posters with stylized “words of wisdom” chosen by community members (e.g., “If two wrongs don’t

I had lived in Charlottesville for 10 years almost to the day before I saw the inside of City Council chambers. I’d paid my gas bill in person once or twice. I think I bought a trash sticker in 2012. But I’d never even been upstairs at City Hall before. If you’d asked me at […]

A few years ago, Molly Conger was just your average Charlottesville resident who, to be honest, didn’t pay much attention to politics. Now she’s got more than 20,000 Twitter followers hanging on her moment-by-moment reports on local government meetings, which she’s been live-tweeting since

Countless studies have found that parents are less happy than non-parents (who, after all, are free to spend their weekends sleeping late, pursuing activities they enjoy, and having uninterrupted conversations). But American parents, it turns out, have got it particularly bad. A 2016 study

In 1986, a young lawyer and UVA grad named Rick Middleton left his job at a national environmental nonprofit in D.C. and moved to Charlottesville. With two other lawyers, a three-year grant, and a small office on the Downtown Mall, he established the first environmental advocacy organization

A 75th wedding anniversary is so rare that the U.S. Census Bureau keeps no statistics on it, Mary Jane Gore tells us. Estimates are that fewer than 0.1 percent of marriages make it to 70 years or more. So this Valentine’s Day week, we tell you about Bill and Shirley Stanton of Afton, who

The tail end of January can be a tough time of year. It’s cold and gray. The rush of holidays is over, with nothing looming on the horizon except the questionable occasion of Valentine’s Day. Spring seems ages away. While you may deal with this turn of events like me (read: wearing out your new

“If Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence,” my 7-year-old asked me the other day, “why did he have slaves himself?” The notion that “all men are created equal” was a radical and noble idea, and it still is, if you take “men” to mean “human beings.” But back then, as I struggled